Confessionalization & Institutionalization (ca. 1530s-ca. 1730s) analyzes the influence of Melanchthon and other theologians during the secular take-over of all legal powers, related also to church matters. In a short-term perspective, the Reformation led to the re-introduction of religious laws (Mosaic Law and aspects of Canon Law), but in the long-term perspective we see the emergence of a more general secularization of the understanding of law through particular interpretations of the Lutheran concept of ‘the two regiments’ and its associate concepts.

The ProNoLa subproject Consolidation & Codification covers the time period from 1660 to ca. 1820. The constellation “Absolutism and Enlightenment” was in this period legitimized by concepts of the King as the Father of nation (Luther’s third ‘estate’ of the household). The Halle-inspired consolidation through confirmation and a national legal order is analyzed in order to identify the impact of legal thinking of natural law in conjunction with religiously supported legal positivism.

Constitutionalization & Hegemonization (ca. 1800s-1950s) focusses on the development towards secular positivism, not least by focusing on how the Nordic constitutions from 1809 onwards paved the way for a monolithic understanding of law, based, on the surface, on a general rejection of religious laws and religious influence of law, though combined with ideas of freedom of religion together with a special concern for the majority churches.

Re-confessionalization and Internationalization (ca. 1914-today) begins with the twofold development of the Luther-renaissance and dialectical theology, concomitant with the democratic breakthrough within the majority churches of the Nordic countries and with a nearly unanimous support also from theological voices to the secularity of Nordic law. The introduction of Human Rights as well as principal distinctions between church and state, however, leads to a broader understanding of collective religious rights than was earlier common in the Nordic countries.

Protestant Legacies in Nordic Law: Uses of the Past in the Construction of the Secularity of Law (ProNoLa) is relevant to the HERA call by researching the conscious and unconscious uses of the Lutheran and broader Protestant past for the construction and institutionally embedding of norms and values in Nordic secular law. The overarching goal of ProNoLa is to examine relations between Lutheran majority traditions, broader Protestant theology, and the development of secular law in the Nordic region in the course of the last 500 years. Highlighting the numerous ruptures, twists and turns in the relationship between law and secularity, the project aims to provide a more complex, nuanced and critical genealogy of the negotiations of law and religion in the Nordic and German realms.

The expected outcome of the research is thus a reformulated grand history about interlinkages between Lutheran and broader Protestant theology within majority and minority churches and the secularity of the law; not only in the historic period until the Enlightenment era, but during subsequent periods into the current re-confessionalisation and internationalization of relations between religions, state and law.

ProNoLa is implemented by organizing research symposia with subsequent publications and dissemination concerning four overlapping but distinct historical periods involving transformation processes and turns; taking its point of departure in Lutheran reformation and reaching into a 21st Century religiously pluralist future. Finally, in the fifth turn, Norden meets Europe the re-telling of the grand history is presented and disseminated to a wider academic and non-academic public.